While I saw the most amazing people on my travels by foot and by bus to and from the campus on Granville Island, I also made a point to visit galleries.
My first trek was to the Vancouver Art Gallery. (Apparently John Lithgow was standing behind me. He left and then the VAG ticket woman nearly peed her pants telling me about it. And unless you count the back of his head, I didn’t see him.) Top billing by the gallery went to a show called The Modern Woman with drawing by Degas, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, but I especially wanted to see Kerry James Marshall’s paintings, and I was surprised along the way by Fiona Tan. In The Modern Woman there were a couple of standout drawings, but for the most part the exhibit felt dry. The layout of the exhibit generated more dialogue for me than the actual works, since the only way to exit was to either turn around and walk back through the entire exhibit or to exit through the gift shop.
Marshall’s large scale perfectly kitschy paintings pulled me in with colour and glitter, but the themes of the works are disturbing (memorializing the dead). The contrast works well. (Mental note taken: use grommets to hang large works.) Fiona Tan’s video works really engaged me as well. Checking the notes I made at the exhibit a month later, I can see that I did not make nearly enough. “White devel.” Did I write that in the darkened video space? My feeling as I left is that Tan’s work is also about the construct of whiteness.
Other shows seen (and not necessarily understood) were Jamelie Hassan’s At the Far edge of Words at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (the class went). The opening of Drawn (a multi venue drawing exhibition) at the Pendulum Gallery. Following weeks I visited the Drawn exhibition components at the Jennifer Kostiuk Gallery and the Elliot Louis Gallery. Each of the three venues offered up some very succinct comments on what drawing is and what it can be. Finally the Charles H. Scott Gallery on the campus opened a painting exhibition by Mina Totino, which appeared to be a dialogue with Susan Rothenberg and Barnett Newman.
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